The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

In which I break the law... This is the story of the crime I committed that haunted me for many years. I think an important thing to note before I tell this story is that I was a stupid child. I may have been pretty successful when it came to the academic stuff but in every way that really mattered I was just naïve and stupid. When I was about eleven the family were driving somewhere and were involved in a very minor accident. Someone rear-ended our car at a pretty slow speed. I burst into tears and my parents thought that I'd been hurt but I was just worried that we were now stuck some fifteen miles from home with no way of returning. I couldn't work out that a car can still drive with minor damage and never considered that there were actually multiple ways we could have got home anyway, from buses to taxis to phoning someone up. As I say, I was stupid.  This tale takes place a few years earlier even than that. I was maybe eight years old and was a member of the local Beavers ...

In which I dissect a joke... You've probably heard the recent controversy over comedian Jimmy Carr. In his recent Netflix special His Dark Material, Carr made the following joke:  "When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives". There has been a lot of reaction to this joke with groups like the Holocaust Memorial Trust and the Gypsy, Romany and Traveller Community condemning it. But there have also been a portion of people who have defended it and point out that it's a joke. I find myself struggling to decide my position on this issue.  Some context- whilst I wouldn't name Jimmy Carr as one of my favourite comedians I have been to a live show of his and enjoyed much of his television work over the years. ...